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Iain, Ian, and You
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<blockquote data-quote="Walker N. Waistz" data-source="post: 6049121" data-attributes="member: 5727"><p>I have found that somehow, the new Marvel Heroic Role-Playing rules from Margaret Weis's company sit in this sweet-spot between the rules and the creativity that I had forgotten was there.</p><p></p><p>Superhero games tend to be where RPGs in general hit their limits. Comic book heroes tend to be able to do all sorts of crazy things that robust rule-sets have trouble with. If you choose an entirely narrative game, where it almost feels like you're just making things up, it allows for this, but it doesn't have enough structural to feel substantial. It stops feeling like a game, because the obstacles become relatively meaningless. Conversely, a very intricate set of RPG rules lends more than enough structure, and excels at establishing obstacles and making achievements feel substantial by making gauging relative difficulty an exact process, but those same features mean you can't have Superman move the moon out of orbit to solve a problem, because that is beyond the scale of the rules.</p><p></p><p>I recently completed a year-long campaign of Green Ronin's d20 system based Mutants & Masterminds, which is a very granular rule-set, in which you can pretty much build anything and your character's parameters are defined very exactly. But in the end, it didn't feel much like playing superhumans. It felt like playing very tough D&D characters. And the exact math coupled with a need to adapt a large variety of concepts made it feel like every character you made was just a slider along the same spectrum. Slide it to the left, and you're Batman, hitting very accurately but doing very little damage; slide it to the right, you're the Hulk, hitting very hard but swinging wildly and often missing. Somewhere in between are everyone from Spider-man to Thor. It ended up feeling like a very precisely delineated variant of rock-paper-scissors.</p><p></p><p>Somehow, the new Marvel rules seem to have found a perfect balance. I am not even sure I understand why, but I have never been this over the moon over rules before. Settings maybe, but not rules.</p><p></p><p>Perhaps the magic has to do with the fact that you can just sort of take any action narratively feasible, but your character sheet lists all the die effects you can apply to doing so. Since every roll is opposed, one way or the other, there is enough challenge to make achievements matter. There is enough system for your mind to hang onto, enough structure to make it feel like you're not just improvising, but that system still gives your imagination all the free room it needs to fly.</p><p></p><p>Kamikaze Midget, I don't know if you are familiar with the new Marvel system, but if you are, I wonder if you have any insights how it does what it does, in terms of the issues you've discussed in recent blogs.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Walker N. Waistz, post: 6049121, member: 5727"] I have found that somehow, the new Marvel Heroic Role-Playing rules from Margaret Weis's company sit in this sweet-spot between the rules and the creativity that I had forgotten was there. Superhero games tend to be where RPGs in general hit their limits. Comic book heroes tend to be able to do all sorts of crazy things that robust rule-sets have trouble with. If you choose an entirely narrative game, where it almost feels like you're just making things up, it allows for this, but it doesn't have enough structural to feel substantial. It stops feeling like a game, because the obstacles become relatively meaningless. Conversely, a very intricate set of RPG rules lends more than enough structure, and excels at establishing obstacles and making achievements feel substantial by making gauging relative difficulty an exact process, but those same features mean you can't have Superman move the moon out of orbit to solve a problem, because that is beyond the scale of the rules. I recently completed a year-long campaign of Green Ronin's d20 system based Mutants & Masterminds, which is a very granular rule-set, in which you can pretty much build anything and your character's parameters are defined very exactly. But in the end, it didn't feel much like playing superhumans. It felt like playing very tough D&D characters. And the exact math coupled with a need to adapt a large variety of concepts made it feel like every character you made was just a slider along the same spectrum. Slide it to the left, and you're Batman, hitting very accurately but doing very little damage; slide it to the right, you're the Hulk, hitting very hard but swinging wildly and often missing. Somewhere in between are everyone from Spider-man to Thor. It ended up feeling like a very precisely delineated variant of rock-paper-scissors. Somehow, the new Marvel rules seem to have found a perfect balance. I am not even sure I understand why, but I have never been this over the moon over rules before. Settings maybe, but not rules. Perhaps the magic has to do with the fact that you can just sort of take any action narratively feasible, but your character sheet lists all the die effects you can apply to doing so. Since every roll is opposed, one way or the other, there is enough challenge to make achievements matter. There is enough system for your mind to hang onto, enough structure to make it feel like you're not just improvising, but that system still gives your imagination all the free room it needs to fly. Kamikaze Midget, I don't know if you are familiar with the new Marvel system, but if you are, I wonder if you have any insights how it does what it does, in terms of the issues you've discussed in recent blogs. [/QUOTE]
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